The Prada Foundation to Open Colossal Art Center in Milan

The latest collaboration between Prada and Rem Koolhaas also features a bar designed by filmmaker Wes Anderson.

In Largo Isarco, the industrial heart of Milan, the Prada Foundation has erected what is arguably the city’s most exciting contemporary art space. Combining seven former industrial structures dating back to the 1910s with three new buildings designed by Rem Koolhaas (who also designed the fashion house's New York City flagship store), the art center nods to the past while stepping into the future. The complex will house a cinema, library, museum, and large exhibition space, which constitutes more than half the compound’s overall 205,000 square footage. The space will play host to symposiums, performances, and art exhibits.

And then there’s this, for cinephiles everywhere: a bar designed "in the traditional Milan café style" by filmmaker Wes Anderson. The bar will be accessible from the street and will mimic the atmosphere of a Milanese café circa the 19th century, when these intimate hubs began sprouting up and served as the grounds for cultural and political debates among artists and intellectuals. You could say that the bar is a microcosm of what the Prada Foundation's new Milan venue promises to be.

Fondazione Prada project director Astrid Welter says that the endeavor “will ensure the foundation will keep on investigating, just on a bigger scale and with the help of various disciplines, what is useful and relevant for cultural discourse today.” The foundation, formerly known as PradaMilanoarte, originally opened its doors in 1993. Now, it continues to branch out beyond haute couture into high art with this campus, which is set to open this May.